


Pretty

by Code16



Series: load bearing [2]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: A/B/O, Alpha!Felicity, Bullying, F/M, Gen, Omegaverse, effemiphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 13:05:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4747505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Code16/pseuds/Code16
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felicity’s path to that office</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretty

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set in my version of an A/B/O verse, and deals with that verse's analogue of effemiphobia, specifically the kind that in our real universe generally shows up as part of transmisogyny. 
> 
> Content warning for that itself, as well as for the fact that I do not have first hand experience with the real world oppression involved and am writing from that position. 
> 
> Important note: effemiphobia and compulsory femininity are both bad, both problems, and the existence of neither one negates the other. Both have to be dealt with. Associating femininity with womanhood is gender essentialist and bad. This story is about Felicity because of specifically Felicity, not because of her gender.
> 
> Other important note: being closeted or otherwise not-open etc, including for your own protection and wellbeing, is an entirely valid choice that people get to make, and should not be derided. The character's decisions in this story are about her own story, and are not commentary on anyone else's life or choices. 
> 
> Different content warning for some analogue-to-'benevolent-sexism' on the part of the main character.

She’d always liked pretty things. 

As a child, it had drawn smiles, sentiment - her mother’s when she let Felicity try on her jewelry, store attendants’ she recruited to seek out the specialest outfits, teachers’ when she took charge of the dress-up corner. Her classmates giggled sometimes - when she carried her own mirror, when she smoothed her blouse and skirt carefully after gym. But Johnny took his favorite doll with him everywhere, and Samantha refused to eat any food that was orange, and it was only normal for children to be different from each other. And her friends wore the cheap children’s bracelets she brought in to share and noticed when she’d gotten new shoes for her birthday, and she smiled back at everyone and thought sometimes of how when she grew up she’d buy herself all the prettiest adult things and become an Administrator (she’s not sure what that is, but they have big computers and her mother says they’re important and can sit down when they work, so that’s what she wants to be) and have her own room full of mirrors like at the store. She drew pictures of it and her mother hung them on the fridge when she brought them home. 

Then they’d started to stop being children (that’s what teachers said, warning them about late assignments and misspelled words), and her aura had started its change. 

At first she hadn’t thought anything of it. There was so much to do already - her Computers teacher had called her Young Coders project amazing and said she could stay after school to work even on days when the club wasn’t meeting, and in her aura classmates were suddenly feeling different, and the aura itself wasn’t working exactly the same way it always had and had to be explored in new ways, and the library set out a section of books for them, and after winter break they’d be starting their Your Changing Self curriculum. That it wasn’t just her body and her aura that would be changing didn’t really give itself to her mind. 

She started her growth spurt, and she carefully went through her clothes and put aside the ones that didn’t fit anymore and made a list of replacements she would need, and Ethan’s (whose aura still said ‘Ethan’ but now said ‘Beta’ almost as clearly as her mother’s always had) father drove them to the mall one weekend.

“Young Alphas section is that way, young Betas section is down an aisle.” The store attendant points Ethan’s father over. Young Alphas - of course, that’s her. She’s not yet fully used to it being her, the way she sometimes writes the wrong year on her papers in January and has to erase it. But she knows Alphas are responsible and brave and earn money for their families, and her mother had always said she was the responsible one, and when that one woman had called the apartment when her mother was out and screamed about lying and knowing where they lived she’d hung up and told her mother later and hadn’t cried, and she’s looked it up and computer jobs are good for money, so she thinks it should be OK. 

The young Alpha’s section is made of black, white, dark, red, and straight lines. All the shirts are square, all the belts are wide and heavy, all the shoes are blocky, and there are no necklaces at all. It’s not _new_ \- there’d always been clothes like that in the children’s section, right next to everything else. That’s what plenty of her classmates had worn. But it hadn’t been for _her._ The Alpha mannequins and pictures are wearing the Alpha section clothes. The adult Alpha mannequins and pictures, when she looks over, are wearing Alpha section clothes. She looks at them and thinks about TV shows, movies. Has she ever seen an Alpha in a necklace? She can’t remember any. “I didn’t find anything I liked,” she tells Ethan’s father at the register, before he drives them home. 

She thinks about it for the next week. She watches her classmates - some of the other new Alphas have new clothes too, and it’s all Alpha section, even for the ones who used to wear patterns and sashes and flowers. She watches people when she’s outside, and Omegas wear blouses and tunics and shoes with heels that she’s always secretly wanted to try even though her mother said they were for adults, and some Betas do. Alphas don’t. Then she asks Hadassah and Mark if she can come with them when Mark’s sister drives them to the mall, and when she’s there she goes straight to the young Betas section.

The Betas section has squares and dark colors, but right across from them it has polkadots and darts and flowing sleeves (and shoes with heels, but she doesn’t try any. She doesn’t think her mother would like it yet). Mark’s sister escorts them to the fitting rooms. “You don’t think she’s a bit… old for that?” the attendant asks her when he starts to give Felicity her number, but Mark’s sister is looking at her book and not paying much attention. “I checked the size,” Felicity says helpfully, in case the attendant thinks she went to the children’s section again by mistake. (She had tried to go to the young Omegas section too, but a family already browsing there had looked at her strangely and she’s not sure why but she felt better when she didn’t get closer to them. She’d already found clothes she liked, anyway.)

In the car, Felicity holds her bags on her lap and covertly runs her hands over the fabric. After all, what did it really matter what sections people put clothes in? Just because a couch pillow was in the living room section didn’t mean she couldn’t put it on her bed. Everyone knew that dynamics might have differences but they were equal. Their history book had said how back when the country began Omegas couldn’t vote even in places that had an assembly, and if they left home their Alphas could say they stole themselves, but that wasn’t true anymore. It was in the Constitution. Her teacher had a picture of the first Omega senator on his desk. And of course wearing clothes wasn’t like being a senator, but the point was that just because a section said her dynamic on it didn’t mean she had to go there. 

Her mother doesn’t really smile when Felicity shows her what she bought. She looks kind of… uneasy. “I checked the prices and I looked for things that were on sale,” Felicity reassures her. She knows her mother worries about money.

Some of her classmates’ parents have started looking at her differently, feeling differently in their auras. Like they’re giving her a test, or something. That’s how being an Alpha must be, she thinks. Everyone is going to have high expectations for her. Like in the novel they’ve started in English - they have to know she can take care of a Bondmate (or Bondmates) someday. She reads the entire Young Coders book and gets her teacher to find her the next one. She’ll show them they have nothing to worry about. 

One day, she gets so engrossed in the computer lab that she misses the first activities bus, and no sports are practicing that day so she’s the only one waiting for the second one. At least she is at first - before long, some older students show up too, standing not quite next to her but not far away either. Something about their auras makes her wish they’d stand farther away.

“Hey, who’s that - I don’t think I’ve seen her before.”  
“What are you, senseless - can’t you tell it’s an Alpha?”  
“An Alpha, really? She doesn’t _look_ like an Alpha.”  
“Maybe it’s synthetic.”  
“Maybe we should check.”  
“Eh, waste of time, what good would she be anyway.”

She doesn’t know if they know she can hear them. She thinks they have to. They don’t actually move closer to her but when the bus comes she gets on as quickly as she can and sits right behind the driver and hugs her bag to her. She’s an Alpha and she’s supposed to be brave but two of them had been Alphas too and there hadn’t been a phone between them, this time. 

It’s the first time, quite like that. It’s not the last.

People stare at her. They whisper things, sometimes shout them. Her friends stop inviting her over, stop responding when she invites them, put bags on adjacent chairs when she tries to find somewhere to sit at lunch. She finds notes pushed into her locker. She has to look up some of the words in them, at first, but soon she knows them all. Jason who sits next to her in geography grabs her mirror when she leaves it on her desk and won’t give it back. She doesn’t think it’s an accident when he drops it on the floor and it shatters. “You really shouldn’t bring that to school,” the geography teacher tells her when she complains. “It’s a distraction.”

She doesn’t think it’s an accident either when Kendra trips her down the last section of stairs. She looks directly back up at her when she dusts off and straightens her skirt as best she can and doesn’t cry until she gets home. 

(“It’s not fair,” she tells her mother when her mother finds her crying, again. “All dynamics are equal.” Her mother hugs her, her own bracelets cool against Felicity’s skin. “Honey, life isn’t fair.”)

She starts her new school. She reads about anti-discrimination laws. The principal sends a letter to her teachers. Not everyone listens. She doesn’t make any friends, but that’s fine. Computers don’t need her to have friends. And they don’t care what clothes she wears.

It’s when she’s about to start high school that her mother sits her down. “Honey, you have to stop this.” She starts to reply - it’s never helped yet, but she’s going to say it - but her mother pulls out rectangles copied from newspapers, lays them out. An Alpha who looked like her, a gun, a coffin. “Honey, please, you’re all I have.”

The next day she goes to the mall. (It closes late, but she always goes early. She shouldn’t be out alone at night.) She goes to the Alphas section, finds every piece of clothing that’s black and nothing else, and fills her cart. She goes to the cosmetics section, and in the bathroom before her mother gets home she dies her hair black.

She doesn’t look ‘respectable’, but this kind, Alphas are allowed. She doesn’t make any friends in high school either. She knows her mother still hopes she’ll bring a nice Omega home one day (or Beta, Beta would be fine) but while searching computer salaries continues to look well, she cuts of anything even approaching that topic. How can she tie someone to herself if this is her life? How can she promise protection to a Bondmate when the only way she can protect even herself is to be someone else?  But she graduates in a robe (black) and not a coffin so she supposes it’s a social success.

College is different. Even as she really didn’t expect it to be, it is. Suddenly, CS courses are more than classes she can ignore and tests she could have passed several years before the first day. And when she’s still ahead, she’s not alone in it. Suddenly, the nights she spends in front of a screen are no longer spent on her own, and with Cooper and Myron she can spent hours talking about justice and code and code that can be justice. Somehow, when the Omega peeks over her shoulder, her fingers seem charged and her programs find even higher overdrive. It’s an art, he tells her, and she has it. The first time they kiss, she almost doesn’t mind that he’s the only one of them whose lips can be also art. 

She doesn’t feel it when he dies. It doesn’t say anything about her, about them, she tries to tell herself later - they had a Connection not a Bond, it’s biologically different, it’s not a failure. But she knows, in the end, that she’s worse than a failure. Alphas are strong. Alphas are focus. Alphas protect. And instead her Omega had died for her. Because she was a coward. Because she was a liar.

She goes to the funeral in black. Friends leave messages on his wall. His picture is one of them together. She stares at it, at her reflection in the screen. He’d loved her, he’d died for her, and he’d never even known her. They’d spent so many words and lines on pursuit of justice, while she betrayed herself every time anyone looked at her. When she traverses the dorm to pack up his things, she takes every article of clothing she has that she isn’t wearing and dumps them in a trash bag on the floor.

She might go to the Omegas section, but she thinks she’d break down. So Betas it is, again. Form-fitting knit sweater, white blouse with a pink pattern. She stops when her eyes fall on the shoes. She never did get to wear them. They’re plain, these ones, but no one could miss that they were heels. Old memories come up entirely easily. She couldn’t run. Not well, not in them. Memories of years-ago dreams follow the nightmares. Cooper and her had planned dreams together, sometimes. Those would never be. It was only her. Carefully, she picks up the box. She’s done running.

(“What happened to you?”  
"This is me now.” _This has always been me._ )

The stares resume. The words. The other things. But it will never be the same again. Her Omega is dead because of her, and they think she’s a bad Alpha for her _clothes_. _All dynamics are equal. I will not lie. I will not hide myself._ She can’t get them to hate her for the right reason, but sometimes she can pretend they do. 

She still loves her mother. When she applies for jobs, she looks up tolerance and hate crime statistics before sending in her resume. Starling City scores well. Queen Consolidated has had an Omega CEO and testimonies to following through on their non-discrimination policy. She knows people will say it’s below her skills. She doesn’t try to explain that she’s not trustworthy, not with code. She doesn’t concern herself if fewer people will say that now that they have actually seen her. She buys pink blouses and makes her lips art. She takes the job.

**Author's Note:**

> This story came out of one, thinking about Felicity and this verse of mine, and two, having a rather '...um, wait, what...?' reaction to the way the fashion-style thing was dealt with in "The Secret Origin of Felicity Smoak" (apparently I was not the only one!) and trying to think about ways to make it work for me.


End file.
